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BikJump ended at 7th place in Geert Maeckelbergh's Country Chess First Divsion of The Netherlands. After a result like this, I feel the well-known "itch" to go back to work on my chess engine again. But first a few more improvements in Chess for Android.

Also, version 2.01 of BikJump ended at second place in the CCC 17th Amateur Series (Division 8), which opens the possibility of promotion to a higher division. Many thanks to Graham Banks for running this tournament!

November last year, I posted a blog entry on my progress with "Deep" BikJump, i.e. adding multi-threading to my engine to speedup the search. Due to many distractions, I have not worked on that feature since that posting....

The chess engine bug is starting to itch again, however, so I decided to pick this up. Hopefully I can release a SMP version of BikJump soon!

My attempts to get consensus on standardizing an option to define the number of processors for an UCI engine on talkchess failed miserably, so I simply picked "Processors". The output of the prototype Deep BikJump on the "uci" command is shown below.

I completed the threading toolkit for Linux and MacOS using pthreads and for Windows using the Windows threads. The latter was slightly more elaborate as I found out that CONDITION_VARIABLE (a synchronization primitive) is only supported on Vista, but not XP. Since I want to keep BikJump as portable as possible, I had to rewrite the Windows version using the slightly less elegant, but more widely supported events in…